Me

That's me, Emanuel Rabina - front-end developer at
Xero; writer and baker (and a
whole host of other things I've failed to list) in my spare time -
based in the tiny little country of New Zealand.

I'm a computer programmer by trade; my career having started in
server-side Java development, although I now spend my days hacking
away with everything HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It's not all geek-thinking in this happy-looking soul; I've
delved into several more creative subjects over the years. The main
thing that has stuck is writing (this website is basically a blog
and repository of my stories), and I have been known to pick up a
guitar from time to time.

I also have a couple of ongoing projects, namely this website,
and any of the things I do related to Thymeleaf
as I'm part of the development team.

The Site

Ultraq is an alias I use on the Internet, and
the Final MooCow is an online portfolio for all my
digital endeavours, as well as a good reason for me to keep my web
development skills up-to-date.

Named after a text file that I used to keep tabs of all of my
stuff, the site was first put up on the Internet in late 2000.
Utilizing the now-much-hated HTML frames and littered with
irrelevant images and semi-relevant quotes, the Final MooCow website
was born. Like any humble beginning, my first hosting plan was one
of those free ones that liked to violate the upper section of your
pages by inserting an epilepsy-inducing advertisement.
We all had to start somewhere right?

The shameful thing is that it stayed that way for several years.
It followed me through high school and university, and was not my
favourite bullet point in my CV. In my last year of university, I
finally decided to do something about it - what self-respecting job
hunter would want to be caught with such a website? Mid-2005 saw a
new look, a paid-for hosting service, and the purchase of my own
domain name: ultraq.net.nz

The job I managed to land later that year introduced me to far
better ways to create websites than I had currently been doing.
From it, my curiosity led me to stumble into the wonderful world of
modern web design and development, and I've been surrounding myself
in that world ever since.

This website is now my web design and development playground,
receiving facelifts and tummy tucks every so often to align with the
latest and greatest web practices, as well as my ever evolving
tastes in design, aesthetics, my improvements in digital image
editing, and my growing programming abilities.

If all these iterations have taught me anything, it's that
there's always something new to learn, something new to do,
something that I can add/take-away from this site to make it better.
It's for that reason I've added the 'work-in-progress' moniker to
the footer of this site since that is what The Final MooCow is: a
constant work in progress.